[NFBCS] Cloud questions:

[Charles Vanek]

Hi Charles,
I’m late to the party on this but it caught my attention while trying to clear out the personal email inbox after a lot of travel this month.

You may have figured much of this out, the answer to using ssh/sftp as it relates to cloud service providers isn’t a totally accurate question when thinking about all the aspects of a security certification.  While GCP, AWS and other providers do have Virtual machines like GCE and EC2 respectively, ssh and sftp are aimed most toward just those virtual machines. The services from the cloud providers are vastly larger than VMs.  When it comes to security and usage of the clouds they all pretty much have command line interfaces for inspecting, configuring and running services from a CLI and Web Console.  GCP for example has “cloud” which I’ve seen do basically everything needed. Though I will admit I’ve not personally run every aspect of GCP services. The nice thing with cloud for example is authenticating is very easy from any linux or windows terminal. The help and reference material on the CLI and from web forums is all pretty good.  The ability to alias or script commands is also very easy if you know your shell.

As for the web consoles there are definitely WCAG compliance bugs, however many things can be conducted there as well. I’m not certain how the SANS 488 course works but I would assume some level of proficiency in AWS, GCP and Azure are required.

The interesting factor that I have seen and fully embraced for security is IaC or Infrastructure as Code in deterministic ways.  Whether using terraform Ansible, or other orchestration the ability to deploy entire application stacks via these tools and having your yaml in source code drastically improves for both sighted and blind technologists the ability to enforce security practices and diff changes over time to many security settings. Configuration management practices driven all through code is somewhat aspirational still today but as the majority of cloud resources can be worked this way the playing field is more level.

I’d really like to hear how the security course is going.  You can certainly message me offline at Charles.vanek at gmail.com

Best,
Charles Vanek 

> On May 9, 2023, at 12:51 PM, Charles E. Black via NFBCS <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> All:
>  
> I have questions about clouds and interaction with them as a blind person. Is it doable and does anyone have information on how to do it, tricks and methodology. Is it possible to ssh into a cloud account and control it from there? Any information would be helpful. I am taking sans 488 and am confused by some of the screens I am seeing. Thanks.
>  
> Black, Charles E.  MS.
>  
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